Göbekli Tepe - An Introduction

Whilst I'm writing up a longer piece on Göbekli Tepe and some of the other, contemporary sites that place it in a broader context, here are these two short clips from German TV, which give a general description of the site, when it was discovered, and what has been found there.

Quoting the site as being older than 11,000 years - it has been suggested that it might be as old as 12,000 years - it's odd to think that Göbekli Tepe was further back in time to the eventual builders of Stonehenge, than they are to us in the modern day - between 6,000 and 7,000 years. We also see how the walls were built in concentric circles, (these were rebuilt at different times, with smaller diameters, which is interesting in that later temples and pyramids from other cultures were usually rebuilt to be larger than their originals); we get to see some good close-ups of some of the T-shaped stelae, complete with animals carved in relief, and even a brief glimpse of site director, Klaus Schmidt.

However, as we shall see in a later essay, Göbekli Tepe wasn't just a one-off phenomenon as has been suggested, but can trace its roots back at least as far as Pushkari, at 22 kya, and maybe back to the days of Sunghir, at over 25 kya. Moreover, there were contemporary sites built around the same time, or rather immediately after Göbekli Tepe, which aren't quite so well known, but are nevertheless just as important in charting the rise of built structures, which weren't built as residential complexes - it has been suggested that it was the construction of places like Göbekli Tepe which encouraged people in surrounding settlements to then begin farming as a means of feeding the multitudes that are thought ot have visited such sites from miles around.

Hopefully I'll be able to add more depth and detail to these ideas during the course of an ongoing post, due to appear here some time in the near future.

see also :: Göbekli Tepe - An Introduction - Part 2